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More than 3,100 anti-authoritarian protests are scheduled across the US and at least 15 other countries on Saturday. All these events will take place under a single banner: No Kings.
Formally launched in June to fight back against Trump administration policies, the No Kings movement has grown with astonishing speed – its second and most recent mass protest in October drew an estimated 7 million participants. Organizers expect Saturday’s events to be the biggest protest in American history.
But the movement is also leaderless, broad in cause and hasn’t advanced any policy demands. Some social movements experts recognize No Kings’ momentum but question if it needs clearer goals.
“There’s not any one way to get people into a movement. You want to have as many doors open as possible because you have to reach people wherever they are,” said Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the co-author of Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America. “The bigger challenge is, once they’re there, how do you keep them there, and then how do you channel that engagement in collective ways?”
But organizers say they are aware of such critiques and that these choices are all by design.
“The name No Kings is, in and of itself, a demand. It is a direct repudiation of this administration, of this regime, of its unconstitutional, illegal, immoral and frankly profane actions,” said Hunter Dunn, an organizer with the 50501 movement, one of the groups behind No Kings. “It’s a declaration of intent that we are going to return power back to the people.”
Why No Kings rallies around a broad cause
No Kings was conceived as a “container” – a framework capacious enough to hold the collective outrage of millions of people with a variety of grievances, explained Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of Indivisible, a progressive non-profit that helped found No Kings.
“A lot of times, historically, when we organize a protest, it’s around one specific issue,” Greenberg said. “No Kings was intentionally conceived to be something that was more about uniting a massive cross-movement push against authoritarianism.”
The movement emerged from the specific context of what Greenberg describes as “elite collapse” – a period in which law firms negotiated with the Trump administration, universities capitulated, and media companies fell quiet. No Kings, she said, was meant to be a mass demonstration to say that ordinary Americans had not signed up for that deal.
Over the last year, demonstrators have embraced the movement’s amorphous nature. People first unofficially organized under the No Kings banner last February as a reaction to the mass firing of federal workers by the Trump administration. In June and October, No Kings was a response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities. Saturday’s No Kings continues to capture Americans’ frustrations with ICE, as well as the rollback of environmental protections, threats to election security and the Trump administration’s war in Iran, among other issues.
“Every No Kings is going to be inherently in dialogue with what is the biggest set of issues that are driving people and that are angering people right now,” Greenberg said.
Why No Kings has no leader
When several prominent progressive organizations, including Indivisible, 50501 and MoveOn, came together to spearhead No Kings, they intentionally designed a decentralized movement that would call in organizations at the local level. The broad-based coalition includes hundreds of labor unions, religious groups, immigrant rights groups, civil rights organizations, and other grassroots, human rights and non-profit groups.
As a coalition, they decided to forgo identifying a leadership hierarchy. “You can’t beat a cult of personality with another larger cult of personality,” said Dunn, referring to Donald Trump. “What you need to do is organize people from the ground up, building power by and for and of the people.”
For some observers, the No Kings leaderless framework raises serious strategic questions – not about the legitimacy of the protests themselves, but about what happens next.
Resistance movements don’t need to identify charismatic figureheads, said Han, but mechanisms through which people can make decisions together and “choose people who we think we’re willing to say: ‘Hey, go sit at the table for us. We’re angry about this thing. Give us a better outcome.’”
Han pointed to the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s as a movement that showed how top-down and bottom-up governance strategies can come together successfully. The boycott created genuine economic leverage against the bus company – but the bus company didn’t give in for 381 days, even as it lost money. The movement’s power, Han said, came not only from the streets but from leaders – such as Martin Luther King Jr, the Montgomery Improvement Association, and clergy members – who could credibly represent and negotiate on behalf of the people in the streets.
Occupy Wall Street, which galvanized a national conversation about economic inequality and gave the country the language of the 99%, dissolved without achieving structural change, in part because there was no one who could credibly negotiate on behalf of the movement, critics have argued. Black Lives Matter had pockets of victories after it built up local leadership and used that structure to contest district attorney and prosecutor races, changing state and local laws around policing in several jurisdictions.
“Scale is often a proxy for power,” Han said. “But it is not power itself. And what the research shows is that just because you pull a lot of people into action doesn’t mean that action turns into the kind of influence for change that you want, unless you scaffold that through a larger strategy.”
However, organizers say that No Kings doesn’t have to be the be-all and end-all to the Trump 2.0 resistance.
“The anti-Trump resistance is not a sprint, but it’s also not a marathon. It’s actually a relay race,” Dunn said. “It’s a handoff between these large mass mobilizations and local organizing, direct action, election defense, registering people to vote, even mutual aid, ICE watch, legal organizing.”
Why No Kings has no policy platform
Critics have pointed out No Kings’ lack of a policy platform as a flaw, a sign that the movement has no real demands.
Marcus Board Jr, a political scientist at Howard University and author of Invisible Weapons: Infiltrating Resistance and Defeating Movements, argues that the standard by which we judge movements – did they produce legislation? Did they win federal policy changes? – reflects an outdated model of political change, one built for a different era. “The legislative and federal route made us think that we could change the world without changing people,” he said. “That’s just not the case.”
The real measure of success, Greenberg said, is what happens in the weeks and months after No Kings: how many people who came out for the first time get asked to the next meeting, the next training, the next organizing effort.
“It’s about the day of, but it’s also about how many people get asked: ‘Hey, can you come to a follow-up meeting? We’re going to talk about our neighborhood’s fight against this warehouse for ICE,’” Greenberg said. “Those are going to be the things that help us see: are we absorbing more people? Are we trying new tactics? Are we getting more people into the fight?”
